Including deliberately failing to tell her anything at all about his interview with Lord Wellesley.

“Well?” demanded Penelope. “Where are we to go?”

Freddy engaged in a lengthy readjustment of his neck cloth. Even with his high shirt points beginning to droop in the heat and his face flushed with the Governor General’s best Madeira, he was still a strapping specimen of aristocratic pulchritude, the product of generations of breeding, polishing, and grooming from the burnished dark blond of his hair to the perfectly honed contours of his face. Penelope could picture him pinned up in a naturalist’s cupboard, a perfect example of Homo aristocraticus .

“Hyderabad,” he said at last.

“Hyderawhere?” It sounded like a sneeze.

“Hyderabad,” repeated Freddy, in that upper-class drawl that turned boredom into a form of art. “It’s in the Deccan.”

That might have helped had she had the slightest notion of where — or what — the Deccan was.

In retrospect, it might have been wiser to have spent some time aboard ship learning about the country that was to be her home for the next year, rather than poking about in the rigging and flirting with the decidedly middle-aged Mr. Buntington in the hope of readjusting Freddy’s attention from the card table. The upshot of it all was that she had learned more than she ever wanted to know about the indigo trade and Freddy had lost five hundred pounds by the time they reached the Cape of Good Hope.

“And what are we to do there?” she asked, in tones of exaggerated patience.

“I,” said Freddy, idly stretching his shoulders within the confines of the tight cut of his coat, “am to be Special Envoy to the Court of Hyderabad.”

And what of me? Penelope wanted to ask. But she already knew the answer to that. She was to be toted along like so much unwanted baggage, expected to bow to his every whim in atonement for an act that was as much his doing as hers. An ungrateful baggage, her mother had called her, tossing up to her all the benefits that had been showered upon her, the lessons, the dresses, the multitude of golden guineas that had been expended upon her launch into Society.